The captured Sinaloa cartel leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman allegedly traveled to Tijuana while on the run from government forces. The purpose: to receive treatment for erectile dysfunction, according to a report this week by the Mexican newspaper Reforma.

Citing “sources close to the investigation of his capture,” Reforma reported that doctors “placed an implant in his testicles so that he could achieve an erection.” The implant increases the blood’s circulation and serves as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, or impotence, the article stated.

The sources told Reforma that Guzman underwent surgery in an unnamed Tijuana hospital following his meeting with the actors Kate del Castillo and Sean Penn, who traveled in October to one of his hideouts in Sinaloa.

Doctors at the maximum security Altiplano penitentiary outside Mexico City noticed the scars while examining Guzman following his Jan. 8 capture by Mexican marines in the city of Los Mochis, the sources told Reforma. “They saw the scars on his back, on his hip and in the reproductive area,” the article stated.

The Reforma article followed a similar story published earlier in the week in the newspaper El Universal in a column by Carlos Loret de Mola, a well-known news anchor on the Mexican Televisa network. Citing high-level sources in Mexico’s National Security Commmission, Loret de Mola said that Guzman left his mountain hideout only once to travel to Tijuana “to receive aesthetic treatment and submit to a surgical treatment for the implantation of a prosthesis.”

In Tijuana, officials told reporters last week that they knew nothing of the drug trafficker’s supposed visit to the city. Baja California’s governor, Francisco Vega de Lamadrid, said the allegations in the news reports needed to be verified, “and from there take the necessary measures.”

One reason Guzman might have selected Tijuana is the fact that the region, once the domain of the Arellano Felix Organization, has grown into stronghold of the Sinaloa Cartel, according to law enforcement officials. In recent years, several sophisticated drug tunnels discovered beneath the San Diego-Tijuana border have been attributed to the Sinaloa group.

If Guzman did travel to Tijuana for treatment, he would not be the first to do so. The city has numerous clinics and hospitals that treat significant numbers of U.S. patients, offering everything from dentistry to plastic surgery to procedures such as lap-band surgery at lower prices than in the United States. Medical groups and government officials in recent years have been eager to increase the numbers of patients through the promotion of medical tourism to the city.